In last night’s episode of Wolf Hall, Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell continued his master class in a skill that comes in handy these days: dealing with the caprices of the very wealthy.

He subtly tells the Boleyn girls that he wants an official government job, perhaps being in charge of the jewel house. By the end of the episode the King has taken ownership of that plan without knowing it came from Cromwell to start with. “Why shouldn’t I employ the son of an honest blacksmith?” he asks Cromwell. “Everything that you are, everything that you have, will come from me.”

The BBC’s £7 million adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels is a cautionary tale of what can happen when so much power and wealth lies in the hands of a single employer.

To today’s viewer Henry VIII is not just a monarch but a boss, and a capricious, entitled one with a list of unpredictable demands and unrealistic expectations to boot. He is the current version of Miranda Priestly, the magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada who demands that her assistant get her the unpublished Harry Potter manuscript because “the twins want to know what happens next”.

There are Henrys everywhere in modern London: City CEOs, icons, moguls, magnates, tycoons, royals — and an increasing number of ultra high net work individuals (UHNWIs) who demand the total devotion of their closest staff.

Often there is no separation between their social and professional lives so working for them is a 24/7 job involving a non-stop schedule of travelling, time zone juggling and diary organisation. You will probably be paid well for your services but make no mistake, this is a vocation, more like being a domestic servant than an employee. Working for one means you will receive extraordinary requests, as Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell or Thomas More did half a millennium ago.

Although today’s autocrats don’t generally murder their servants (Henry killed his father’s top advisers Dudley and Empson and his own aides John Fisher, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More, with Wolsey dying soon after his arrest) they do exterminate relationships the minute a courtier falls out of favour, creating a toxic environment of backbiting and manoeuvring.

Like Cromwell returning to regale his household at Austin Friars with the stories of Henry’s unbelievable requests, the advisers, aides and concierge fixers of today’s Henry equivalents are often amused and appalled in equal measure.

There’s the film company executive who drags staff from their beds at 3am for “urgent” meetings at locations of his choice, in true Tudor despot style. “He got us out of bed for a dream?” someone says to Cromwell as he goes to Henry in one scene in Wolf Hall. “Believe me, he gets one out of bed for far less than that,” another replies.

Then there’s the foreign billionaire who asked an associate to delay a Premier League match because he was running 20 minutes late. “We thought it was a joke,” the associate says. “His office kept calling until we explained that it doesn’t work like that. He’s so used to delaying planes, cars, restaurant tables and meetings, he doesn’t understand why a football match and stadium of thousands of fans can’t be delayed too.”

Simon Blackford, co-founder of boutique concierge service Ellidore Lifestyle, says a client recently asked for two Peruvian “bespectacled” bears to be stationed outside a mansion she had hired for a party. “I did a bit of research. It turns out they are pretty violent creatures and endangered,” says Blackford. “She wasn’t understanding when we told her.”

Last summer another client asked for her mother’s ashes to be shot by powerful fireworks from a hired boat on the Thames — a request that was turned down by the Port of London Authority. “We had a 60-year-old woman who wanted us to empty the theatre for Dirty Dancing so that she could watch it on her own,” he says. “You’ve got to let them down gently.”

Another source speaks of the media honcho who, when angry, smashes mobile phones on the dashboard of his car — not his own mobile, obviously. Those of his long-suffering minions.

Then there are the insecure divas who want PAs to be with them all hours — even sharing their bed — or the pop star who wants nannies “to work round the clock, round the year without a holiday,” says one who was interviewed. “I was told I’d be paid double for holidays and weekends, not be able to take them.”

Henry VIII’s desire to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn is perhaps the most event-changing boss request in British history. It resulted in the deaths of advisers, the dissolution of the monasteries, the destruction of chunks of the country’s finest art and the halting of a centuries-old allegiance to the Catholic Church.

The second wife: Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall (Picture: Company Productions Ltd/Giles Keyte)

Admittedly that’s on a grand scale compared with the tedious hours waiting for dry cleaning, or squeezing toothpaste onto the royal toothbrush as one of Prince Charles’s servants is said to have done. “What it is to serve a prince,” one of Wolsey’s aides muses as they row across a lake.

“Henry was the world’s most demanding boss,” says historian Tracy Borman, author of the recently published Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant. “You were on duty all the time if you served Henry.”

Modern-day stories of diva behaviour abound. One wealthy London business owner demanded his private jet take an unscheduled detour to Paris so that he could buy his mistress a box of her favourite macaroons. A supermodel asks her live-in nannies to pick her up from parties in the middle of the night, while the PA to a famous designer is asked to clear up after her incontinent dog.

Concierge service Quintessentially says typical requests include helping a client in the South of France source a dress she’d spotted in a magazine and having it flown from Harvey Nichols in Manchester so that she could wear it to a party that evening.

King Henry’s request for an annulment was so unreasonable that at first his courtiers didn’t believe it. “Wolsey didn’t take him seriously,” says Borman. “He made a show of trying [to get the annulment], but didn’t think it would happen. It was only later they realised the King was actually going to push for this. It was shocking.”

Borman once had an unreasonable boss herself. “You had to work ungodly hours and stay until after him, removing your social life. He would ask for something, then forget, then ask why you had done it.” The similarities don’t end there. “Sometimes our meetings would take place in castles.”